Hi! I’m trying to make a nice round fillet along an edge, tapered in radius. If you imagine a block where one edge is beveled, one side of the bevel would be radius 1, the other would be radius 0.
I found this excellent thread about hacking a tapered chamfer, but I can’t figure out how to smooth it. Doing the chamfer method and then rounding the new corners doesn’t work, presumably because the point where all all edges meet is invalid.
Any tips? Thanks!
Found a partial solution, but it’s VERY hacky and pretty buggy. Basically used the scale tool to make one end of a cutaway smaller.
This is the piece I want to extrude (ignore the other ones behind it). The corner with the gizmo is where the fillet should be zero, and the far side is 3mm.
I made a 6mm square with a 6mm circle in it, so one of the corners is the overall fillet that I want to cut (the same as what you’d get from just filleting an edge R3mm, I could’ve done that and subtracted a copy I suppose)
I then opened up the scale tool and moved the pivot to the outer corner
Scaling to zero doesn’t work, but I found that 0.001 does. It collapses to a point. If you highlight it and select fully included items over the point, with Faces Only selected, nothing gets selected.
Behold, a pointy fillet. I’m guessing the engine is doing some floating-point rounding for the very, very small size.
I moved it over to the block I wanted to cut from
Subtracted it from the block
And, done. At a glance it seems to work, but if you look closely you can see there’s some weird glitchiness going on with the shading.
Front view, with the artifacting a bit more apparent.
Side view, VERY apparent
But hey, backside looks good
The shading looks pretty wonky, but honestly the shape itself is wonky - it makes sense it’d be sharp at the far corner and smooth at the other. But in theory it should look smooth almost immediately after the corner, since it instantly becomes a fillet. The gradient would be small but smooth, this looks like what you’d get from an alpha fade from full gradient shadow to full sharp shadow.
I don’t care about the shading, but the fact that it looks funky implies the engine really doesn’t like what’s going on. Honestly I hate using the Scale tool, it’s so arbitrary where designs have to be so precise.
If there’s a less hacky way to achieve this, please let me know! Cheers
Hi Curiobot.
Will this produce what you are seeking?
This method uses a Construction Plane Perpendicular to Curve at a Point
Set up an angled curve to appropriately align the inner radius of the ‘blade’ like tool, by setting the curve to pass through the material and guide the blade and remove the unwanted material.
In this image the rectangle on the material rear face, at top right, measures 5mm across the diagonal.
This guides the inner diameter of the tool to the top right corner of the material.
For reference, the tool has a 5mm inner diameter and 7.5mm outer diameter.
The long slow and diminishing curves illustrating the surface edges, created by this action, differ from the method used above.
Drag the Point to an appropriate position on the Curve and tap on the Construction Plane formed before creating a Sketch to sketch the tool.
Select the tool and drag the arrow to pass the tool through the material in a continuous movement.
Best wishes, G
Thank you! @Gelphyn! Was a bit finicky to get this working (I also had some success using the Sweep tool) but this solution is fantastic.
My MO is to think about how a shape could be formed in the real world. In this case, possibly a spinning Router Blade?
The magic of Shapr3D is that it offers all the tools needed. The user simply has to choose the best one for the job. That is not to say the choice, in this case, was the best. The key is to experiment as you have done.
Pleased to learn that my input was useful. Best wishes, G.
What about Loft?
